Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Found in an email. Google gives +M hits including some song titles. Does that make it a mondegreen, too?
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All depends on your definitions. If any restructuring which happens to occur in a song is thereby shown to be a mondegreen, sure it is. But that may not be the most useful definition.
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I would consider it somewhat mondegrenous by my definitions whether or not it occurs in a song or poem (which I take to be a peripheral aspect of what I take to be the mondegreen phenomenon). It is a restructuring, standard for at least some of its perpetrators (like an eggcorn) probably arising from mishearing (a slip of the ear rather than the tongue), which doesn’t make a lot of sense (as most mondegreens don’t but eggcorns by definition do.) It is not, however, like most mondegreens, restricted to a single context (by occurring only as part of a longish phrase); there are lots of examples of have way across , have way through , come have way , have way house and so forth; it seems likely to be a restructuring of halfway in pretty much any context for some people.
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It probably has a better claim to be called a malapropism: it is the use of the wrong word ( have ) in place of a similar-sounding right word ( half ) with no particular semantic appropriateness to the substitution.
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If it made sense (and who am I to say it can’t—I just haven’t seen it yet) it would be a good eggcorn.
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btw, welcome back to the forum, ray. (smiles evil Lee)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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